Maya doesn't use Smoothing groups per say, It's just defining hard and soft edges. The closest way to mimic them would be going through and hardening the outside edges of the shell/UV island and softening the interior ones.

Okay, nice hack but you might as well cut out whole baking process and generate your normal from diffuse. Because resulting map doesn't have any big or medium surface definition left, just surface dents and noise.

This process doesn't make any sense at all.
If the gradients are there after your bake, it's that they are supposed to be there to compensate for the lowpoly shading, or you did something wrong. You shouldn't have to hack around in Photoshop like this.

And your final image still looks wrong, there are some weird inner bevel type effects on all the edges.

This has come up in other normal map threads but yeah, what they said above me. If you have to hand tweak the normal map afterwards, that means you're going to have to do that every time you update the normal map. That will add up to a lot of busy work over the course of a project. A LOT of busy work.

@ sandro - Baking a diffuse to normal isn't going to give you the right results at all. The information is usually not what you want most of the time. You usually want a height map but then you lose out on edge quality so you compensate through extra geo on edges.

Yeah, just changing the smoothing groups can help but it doesn't always. Sometimes it come down to the geo, so without retopoing the entire thing this is just a quick hacky fix.

Right, the biggest problem with this sort of things is they have this horrible tendency to snowball. You post some seemingly harmless bit info about something you've done, and all of a sudden we'll see countless people who don't really understand what or why you've done it repeating it because they think "gradients in normal maps are bad". Even worse, these people start popping in to other threads in tech talk and telling them to follow the advice in this thread, instead of taking the time to learn and understand WHY smoothing errors occur in the first place.

I don't know why everyone is making a huge issue. It's a good trick if you do have unwanted normal map shading. Of course you should always make sure you have the best possible bake but we all know normal maps are not always perfect, and this could be useful at some point.

i think the only problem with this thread is the title and it's approach. like many of your mention, this is the intention of normals from the bake and this isn't a general problem.

I don't know why everyone is making a huge issue. It's a good trick if you do have unwanted normal map shading. Of course you should always make sure you have the best possible bake but we all know normal maps are not always perfect, and this could be useful at some point.

Its not a good trick, its a hack that tries to make up for incorrect execution.
If you model the base correctly you wont get this issue. No one should ever recommend visually editing normal map gradients.

take a little look at Earthquakes work and you will see what can be achieved with correct normal map workflow.